Made a spiral #Christmas tree out of a 5-meter strip of APA-102 #LEDs. I think it turned out pretty good for being made out of some leftover #PVC and steel wire. It’s being controlled via a ~$2.50 arduino Pro Mini clone with a 2A 5V wall wart sitting inside a cheap Ziplock plastic container.
It’s running a slightly modified version of the ColorPalette example in the #FastLED library. I’ll do some more programming once I figure out what to do with my other 5-meter strip.
Great job. Make the tree twice as big with the other strip! Did you know that the library has power limiting functions? You should look into it! https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/blob/master/power_mgt.h
so the plastic baggy works without overheating??? i want to do the same with my balcony lights haha
It’s not a bag… It’s a tupperware-like plastic container. Not sure if this is the exact size but it’s probably close: http://m.ziploc.com/ziploc-brand-containers-smart-snap-seal-divided-rectangle.html
Oh awesome thanks
There isn’t much in the way of Christmas stuff here in the Islamic Sultanate, so I showed this to the boss and she said ‘go for it!’. I’ve got an old Ikea standard lamp upright I can re-purpose and some steel wire I used to snake/monitor-proof the fence that will do the job just great. I think I will pick up some rice paper to give it some diffusion and ‘body’, though. Great idea, @Dan_McDougall
Another effect that might be cool is to use the Holiday Twinkle Lights from https://gist.github.com/kriegsman/5408ecd397744ba0393e (thanks again Mark!) but have it set all the lights to an evergreen color at the top of loop() before doing the lighting effects, and turn down the density… so it’s a mostly green tree with different colored sparkle bits on it. I’m not by any lights that can be messed with right now, or I’d test it myself first.
Yeah, I was always going to use Mark’s new Twinkle 
@Josh_Ward Oh yes. I didn’t have time to play with it much after setting it up but I’m definitely going to try out that Holiday Twinkle code. Love the idea about making it green.
The reason why I have it mostly rainbow colors at the moment is because that’s what my 5yo daughter likes the best (and my 7yo son didn’t have an opinion hehe).
@Jon_Burroughs Yes I’m aware of the FastLED’s power control features. My response to that is, “did you know holiday lights are supposed to be as obnoxiously bright as possible?” Hahaha.
I’m sure the full ColorPalette program would work fine if I just turned down the brightness from 255 but that wouldn’t be as fun 
Nothing says Christmas like a burned-out retina!
+1 for Deliberately Obnoxiously Bright
The thing I like about using the power control instead of just turning down the master brightness (setBrightness) is that it will actually let the brightness run all the way up to 255 if you’re still within the power envelope; it only scales the brightness down when you try go past the power limit that you’ve set.
When running AC-powered projects, I use it as a fire-prevention tool. (Don’t get me wrong – I love fire, but I hate having to rebuild something that I put hours of labor into. Plus it’s hard to get the smell of electrical smoke out of the drapes.) So maybe if I’m running on a 12V 4A power brick, I’ll tell FastLED that I have a 12V 4.25A power brick. That’ll let me spike up a bit past the rated limit, but it’ll keep me from inadvertently trying to draw 5A. Things will get warm, but not ignition-warm.
I have this idea for the future that in addition to the “hard limit” power setting, there should be a “soft limit” that can be exceeded for a short time. E.g., you could set the hard limit at 4.5A, and the soft limit at 4A. So you’d be able to spike up past 4A for a few seconds before being clamped back down. This would let you have searingly-bright [strobe] effects that lasted for a short time, but if your animation tried to sustain that level of power draw, it’d get scaled down to a maintainable level.
I must remember to use it… I’ve got all these 5A5V switch-mode supplies, I forget that it also works as a safety feature, not just for conserving battery power.
@Dan_McDougall I like bright, as long as it doesn’t burn down my house! haha